Dear Weary Caregiver

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Current revision as of 20:29, 30 July 2025

Like you, I am a close companion to the blessings and challenges of caregiving. Maybe you are the primary caregiver to a spouse with a terminal illness. Perhaps you are caring for an aging parent with dementia. Or, like my wife and me, maybe you are the caregiver to a child with complex medical needs and profound disabilities. Our Levi is the oldest of our four children. He is a teenager but functions like an infant and continues to battle life-threatening medical conditions. Regardless of your precise situation, caregivers share common burdens and concerns.

Caregiving involves sacrifice, sleepless nights, and painful days. We often may feel like the psalmist who confesses, “My tears have been my food day and night” (Psalm 42:3). Did you ever think that your heart could hurt so bad — that life could get this complex and demanding? I never did. Nor did I imagine I could experience such abundant life and joy in laying down my desires for another. Over the years, my wife and I have cared for Levi amid five open-heart surgeries, dependence on a trach and ventilator, and, most recently, brain surgery. Yet no matter the situation, Jesus’s words have rung true: “It is more blessed to give than to receive” (Acts 20:35).

But for those (like me) who need regular reminding, here are three lessons God is teaching me about himself and his ways as I care for my boy. I hope they encourage you as you continue to lay down your life in the service of another.

1. God’s faithfulness upholds us.

After years of caregiving, God’s faithfulness is not simply something I acknowledge. It is a precious, ongoing reality I experience. For God to be faithful means that he is constant. He is enduring, steadfast, and trustworthy. All that he says he will be, he is; all that he says he will do, he does. Always.

As caregivers, we rest in God’s faithfulness not only because he has been faithful in the past, but also because he promises to be faithful in the present and future:

As for you, O Lord, you will not restrain
your mercy from me;
your steadfast love and your faithfulness will
ever preserve me! (Psalm 40:11)

All God’s ways are bathed in his unwavering commitment to himself and the people he loves (Psalm 25:10). Even in hardship, we can confess, “In faithfulness you have afflicted me” (Psalm 119:75). We see God’s faithfulness chiefly at the cross of Christ but also in the ten thousand ways he cares for us in this life. Although we are repeatedly tested by fire, God’s faithfulness anchors us, providing strength and protection throughout our days (Psalm 91:4).

At the end of the age, we will see heaven open and behold the one who “is called Faithful and True” (Revelation 19:11). In this life and the life to come, God will forever be all that he promises to be, all that we need him to be. He is our Captain and our King, our Co-Sufferer and High Priest, our Rest and our Reward. “Therefore let those who suffer according to God’s will entrust their souls to a faithful Creator while doing good” (1 Peter 4:19).

2. God’s care enfolds us.

There is a saying that God will not give you more than you can handle. The saying is true if “you” means “you empowered by the Holy Spirit.” But the Bible emphatically declares that God does give us more than we can handle on our own. The apostle Paul writes,

We were so utterly burdened beyond our strength that we despaired of life itself. Indeed, we felt that we had received the sentence of death. But that was to make us rely not on ourselves but on God who raises the dead. (2 Corinthians 1:8–9)

As a caregiver, God will likely bring you to the end of yourself. The height and breadth of your neediness will often make you feel unfit for the job God has bestowed upon you. But God intends for your lack to propel you into his ever-sufficient, never-failing ocean of care for you.

Consider the Gospels. Often, the people who approach Jesus most fervently are caregivers, typically parents of children with an illness or disability. When I read of a parent imploring Christ for help, it gives me hope that my desperation isn’t an anomaly. Throughout the ages, life as a caregiver has been challenging; watching the ones you love suffer makes the heart ache. Yet — both then and now — Christ does not scorn or ridicule those who approach him in need. Instead, the pattern of our Savior’s heart is to listen and to help.

So, during long nights and hard days, do not think that God has languished in his care for you. He never grows faint or weary. He never sleeps or slumbers. He will help you, provide for you, enable you, and sustain you week after week, month after month. He will care for you when you feel overwhelmed and alone (1 Peter 5:7). He will encourage you when you are weary (Matthew 11:28–30). He will comfort you when you are filled with sorrow (Psalm 34:18). And he will revive you again and again: “You who have made me see many troubles and calamities will revive me again” (Psalm 71:20). In a word, our God is a steadfast well that will never run dry. He is the ultimate and unfailing caregiver.

3. God himself is enough for us.

It is hard to describe what daily life demands of caregivers. Often, caregiving is an all-day and all-night reality. We don’t get to clock out or mentally shift away from the caregiving state of mind. Yet by God’s grace, there is nowhere else I would rather be.

Why? The unique complexities of caring for a severely disabled, medically fragile, and nonverbal fourteen-year-old — alongside caring for three other children — can often feel crushing. But such challenges do not contradict God’s good and wise design of all people (Psalm 139:13–16), his sovereignty over sickness and disability (Exodus 4:11), and the image he places on each person he forms within the womb (Genesis 1:27). In fact, caregiving has heightened my experience of God and these truths, further sanctifying my calling.

In your own caregiving, may you rest in the reality that amid life’s difficulties, you have God. In fact, it is through your exact situation — however deep, hard, and painful the circumstance may be — that God is giving you more of himself. In his wisdom, God has ordained to use your caregiving to make you more like Christ. As hard as this truth can be to embrace, remember that in God’s economy, the way up is down. The weak are strong. Dying is living. And loss is gain.

So, rejoice in the God of your salvation. You will always have an abundance in him (Habakkuk 3:17–18). As Jesus says, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst” (John 6:35). Where God is, there is no want. He is truly enough.

Pressing On

You may be a caregiver for a short season or a decade. Or maybe God has led you into deep waters that will last most of your lifetime. Whatever the length of your care, God remains victoriously committed to your good. He has not abandoned you like an orphan or left you to your own resources. One day, when our task is complete and we are face to face with our King, I believe we will look back and say, like David Livingstone, “We never made a sacrifice.” If only we could see that in the joys and challenges of caregiving God “is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison” (2 Corinthians 4:17).

So, dear caregiver, do not give up. God is faithful. He is caring. And he is enough. He really is all that he has promised to be.